The Elements is a special OS X edition of the highly acclaimed award-winning iPad app now downloaded over 850,000 times. It is based on the best-selling book by Theodore Gray, Popular Science Magazine's Gray Matter columnist. The app goes way beyond what is possible on paper AND THIS OS X EDITION NOW FEATURES LIVE VIDEO DEMONSTRATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS.

You start off at a living periodic table where every element is shown with a smoothly rotating sample. To read about tin, click on the tin soldier. To read about gold, select the gold nugget. Immediately you see the sample filling nearly the entire screen, photographed to razor sharpness and rotating around a complete circle in front of your eyes. Beside that is a column of facts and figures, each of which can be selected to bring up the list of elements sorted by that order.

Click on the Wolfram|Alpha logo to get even more rich detail and current information through the embedded Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine.

Go to each element's second page and you find a fascinating story about the element, surrounded by carefully photographed objects representing it. Every one of these objects, well over 500 in total, is a freely rotatable, live object that can be examined from all sides and zoomed up to experience in unprecedented detail.

Select the element name at the top of the page and you can see that element's name in over a dozen different languages. Choose one and you'll find that the entire book, stories, captions and all, switches to that language: The Elements includes both the full English original text and 16 other languages.

Any object can also be presented as a pair of stereo 3D images. Using inexpensive 3D glasses you can see all 500 objects pop off the screen in 3D, and you can spin the objects, in 3D, with the touch of a mouse. You can't get much more virtually real than that.

And now 70 elements feature a third page with demonstration videos of the element in action, unique content for this MacOS version of the app. See what happens when chlorine gas is squirted into a saucepan of molten sodium, when several gallons of liquid nitrogen are poured into a lake, or when white phosphorus is ignited in an atmosphere of pure oxygen.

If you had a bad experience with chem class in school, this book is the antidote. If you or someone you know is afraid chemistry will be their most boring subject, this book will show them that there's a lot more to the periodic table than a bunch of numbers and letters.